Tina Sawyer drove her black 1999 Chevy Silverado down Baton Rouge’s Florida Boulevard, heading west since leaving Airline Highway. She passed a used furniture retailer and a dollar store and thought she might want to stop at the dollar store on the way back from her errand. Tina’s brother, Tom, rode shotgun, literally. He was in the passenger seat and a 12-gauge pump shotgun lay casually across his lap. Jim Picket was their friend and Tina’s sometime lover, although sometime “humper” might have been a more accurate description. He sat in the bed of the pickup with his back against a wheel well.
Tom and Jim were twenty-three and Tina was nineteen. The guys wore tattered jeans and light flannel shirts with the sleeves cut off. Tom was nearly six foot tall and rail-thin, and Jim was five-eight with his weight north of two hundred and fifty pounds. Tina had on jean shorts and a red tube top that worked overtime to restrain her large breasts. The guys had battered LSU ball caps covering their shaved heads, and Tom wore his beard long. Jim preferred a goatee. Tina’s long, bottle-blonde hair was snarled and frayed. It flowed out from under a faded Tulane cap. One thing the three had in common was they were all hopped up on crystal meth. Tina also drank a mixture of grain alcohol and lemonade from a plastic water bottle as she drove. She called it Louisiana Lemonade and it carried a kick. The boys drank warm beer out of longneck bottles. They’d consumed six apiece on their hour-long drive over from Loranger.
It was unseasonably warm, almost eighty degrees, and they drove with the windows down. The window between the cab and the bed was open, too, and Jim played imaginary drums while the Misfits “Green Hell” blasted back to him and anyone on the sidewalks.
Tina turned off the boulevard and down an alley. She pulled into the back lot of a one-story brick ranch-style building and nudged up against the rear steel exit doors of the Capitol City Women’s Clinic. Then she turned and yelled back to Jim, “Give ‘em hell !”
Jim reached down with his left hand and pulled a whiskey bottle out of one of the two full cases that sat by his side. The smell of gas was heavy in the air as they idled. He worked the fingers of his right hand to extricate a cigarette lighter from the pocket of his too-tight jeans. When he had the lighter out, he flicked it a couple of times until a flame sputtered to life. He lit the end of the rag that hung from the bottle and tossed it at the window of the building ten feet away. It exploded as it broke the window, raining liquid fire inside the building.
“Shit, yeah!” Jim shouted as Tina shifted into reverse and smashed the pedal down. Jim was still a little off-balance from his throw, the beers, and the meth, and he fell against the case of bottles closest to him. Nothing broke, but gas splashed inside the bed of the truck and all over his shirt. “Damn! Fuck!” he yelled. “You’re gonna break my fuckin’ neck back here!”
Tom laughed. When Tina stopped her backward progress by slamming the Silverado’s rear bumper into a shiny new red Honda Civic, he pulled the shotgun to his shoulder and pumped three quick blasts of number four shot through the building’s other window that faced them. The noise inside the cab was deafening and Tina yelled “Jesus fuckin’ Christ!” Jim rolled almost to the tailgate when they collided with the Civic. He cussed a blue streak. Tina slid the transmission back into drive and roared out of the parking lot and down the alley the way they had come. She hurtled out into traffic and spun the wheel hard to the right. She fishtailed but made the turn and at the first corner, she made another hard right. Jim rolled around in the bed like cheap luggage, the bottles of gas splashing all over. Now they were in front of the building they’d just firebombed. Tina roared into the driveway and pulled to a stop by the front door. The door started to swing open, but when Tom pumped his first shotgun blast into the opening, the door closed again. Jim, still cussing, lit another bottle and flung it at the nearest window. He hit the side of the building and the flames licked harmlessly at the brick face.
“Christ sakes!” Tina screamed. “Cain’t you hit nothin’, ya stupid turd!”
“Fuck it!” Jim hollered back, lighting the next bottle. “Any dickwad can drive a truck, Tina! Try throwin’ a bottle a’ fire if ya think it’s so fuckin’ easy.” He lit and tossed another bottle and it burst through the window and showered fire inside the building. “Get the fuck outta here!” he shouted.
Tom had reloaded and he pumped three more shots into the building as Tina backed up with a squeal of tires and got them back into traffic. She shifted into drive and they rocketed forward. “Shit, yeah,” Jim hooted loudly as he watched the Women’s Clinic of Baton Rouge billow smoke and flames.